First time to Summit County from Pittsburgh, PA 3/7-3/14

I'm finally heading out to Colorado to do some real skiing starting next week, from the 7th through the 14th. I'm traveling with two of my cousins and a couple other friends and we are really looking forward to the trip.

Like I said, this will be my first time skiing outside of PA, but my cousin has made six trips to Colorado in the past so it will be nice to be with someone who has experience in the Rockies. I most frequently ski at Seven Springs in Central PA, about a 1.5-2 hour drive from my home in the South Hills of Pittsburgh. I am a pretty good skier and frankly I usually get bored with 7 springs pretty quickly. There is not a run there that makes me feel even the slightest bit uncomfortable and I usually end messing around on trails or riding through trees (on the rare occasion that there is enough snow) after a couple hours of cruising the groomers. Needless to say I am really looking forward to the better conditions and more challenging terrain in Colorado. That said, I am usually pretty conservative and not very prone to taking any crazy daring risks, so while i understand that for the first time I will come across terrain that i am not ready to handle, I'm not overly concerned with getting in over my head.

Now for some specifics:

Our non stop (glad we got this) flight leaves Pittsburgh at 10:55 am Saturday the 7th and is scheduled to arrive in Denver at 12:30 pm local time. There are 8 of us total so we are renting 2 SUVs from the airport.

From the airport we have about a 2 hour drive, traffic and weather permitting, to the condo that we rented for the week in Silverthorne. We were really happy with the location and price of the condo, for the 8 of us it cost about $200 per person for the whole week and we are within 15-20 min of several major resorts and only 30-40 min from Vail.

In terms of our skiing schedule, we don't have much set in stone as we are going to try to adjust to the weather and conditions, ideally going to Vail on the nicest day. We bought a 3 day epic pass for Breckenridge that we plan on using at Vail, Breckenridge, and A-Basin. Thanks to my other cousin who lives in Denver we also have collected a bunch of the Shell Gas BOGO coupons that we plan to use at Copper and possibly Loveland if we are feeling up for a fifth day. My cousin has been to all of the "snow.com" resorts before but has never been to Copper or Loveland. However after doing some reading, Copper seems like somewhat of a hidden gem and it's definitely one of the mountains that I am most looking forward to skiing.

I have done a lot of research and I feel pretty comfortable about everything, but if anyone has any tips they want to share about anything, especially some stuff about Copper since we will all be first timers there, I will definitely appreciate it.

I am really looking forward to this trip and I definitely plan on updating, with photos, as the week goes on.

Have you looked at any of the EpicSki Resort Pages for the places you are going? Scroll down to the bottom to find a list of related threads.

For Copper, I added a tag link you can use to go directly to the Copper page. Look under Topics Discussed (right hand column).

I have read some reviews on all of the resort pages here and took a quick look at some of the trail maps on the individual websites, but I have found that looking at the maps doesn't help much without some prior understanding of how the mountain is set up. I would attribute that to trying to depict these huge mountains in 2 demensions. I looked at the vail trail map for about 20 min before, I think, getting a general idea of how the mountain is setup. But like I said it will be nice having someone who has been to most of the resorts so we aren't wasting a lot of time trying to figure out where we are.

Couple lifts that I think you'll enjoy if you like terrain that's a step up for you but not too much of a step as you get used to the Rockies:

1. At Arapahoe Basin: the Lenawee and Zuma lifts. You can take the groomer down, but they both have interesting, rolling, ungroomed terrain that you'll have to figure out. The figuring out is what makes it fun.

2. At Copper: the Excelerator lift. The mostly ungroomed runs here are fairly short, and most of them are bump runs. They are good introduction to the genre. A similar lift though with more groomed terrain is the Timberline Express (which actually is probably the best place to start). Not sure how the snow conditions are this year (I used to ski Copper regularly but moved last year) but the Blackjack lift on the backside is fun too, with runs that are a bit steeper.

3. At Loveland get yourself over to chair 8 for a good mixture of mixed terrain with both groomed and ungroomed conditions. No lines over there either.